Tale of two tw*ts at the Daily Express

On Sunday 17th January, the Daily Express ran a story on its website with the headline ‘Is the BBC run by a bunch of Twitters’…only you can’t actually see the story any more because it’s been taken down (more on this later), but rest assured, it was there. In fact, one of the journalists behind it, David Stephenson, the Express’s TV critic, even tweeted about it here.

It was co-written by David Jarvis, although quite why, I don’t know, as the story was barely more than a few paragraphs. It basically accused the BBC of wasting taxpayer’s money by its staff using Twitter to send out messages that were seen by very few, if any, people. Its evidence was that the BBC accounts in question had few, if any, followers on Twitter. Had this been true, it would have been a reasonable accusation. Surely a Twitter account run by the BBC should have at least one follower. The problem for the Express journalists David and David was that the accounts in question did have at least one follower. In fact, they had hundreds in one case and thousands in another.